Isn’t the word “basal metabolism” a little hard to understand? But the word is commonly used now. Basal metabolism can be explained as an amount of calories, or heat, being burnt 24 hours even while you are asleep.
The amount of energy that humans basically consume no matter if you are up or asleep is from 60% to 75% of the entire energy consumption. The energy consumed by movements, body activities and brain activities account from 25% to 40%. From this figure, you can see that it is not very efficient to try increasing energy consumption by exercise. Basal metabolism is mainly for keeping our temperature stable, and this heat is produced by muscles. As every activity of human beings such as, Organs like liver and kidneys, blood circulation, or white blood cells, is ruled by body temperature, a human body has to always keep burning energy even while you are asleep.
By the way, we tend to feel our metabolism having decreased as we pass our 40’s. Even if you eat the same amount as the young days, it cannot be burned completely and the extra energy is stored in your body as fat. Then, you start to feel hard to lose weight. You experience that your weight does not drop even though you are consciously limiting the amount of food to eat, although you could once lose weight easily by reducing meals just for a week. Now, let’s think about what we can do to increase metabolism.
In order to increase basal metabolism, we should first try to increase our muscle. Body fat increases as we grow older, and body muscles decreases on the contrary. We can weigh only fat out of our body with a body fat scale, but the only problem is that they are not very accurate.
As muscles burn fat with their mitochondria, they burn extra fat and turn it into body heat. The more muscle you have, the more fat is turned into heat. So what kind of exercise should we do to gain muscle? Aerobics or anaerobics? It depends on your preference. You should choose the one you like and can continue longer. The most important thing is to have a strong consciousness that you are working out, no matter what exercise you are doing. You don’t necessarily have to go to a gym to work out.
People are making movements anytime except when you are sleeping. So whatever movements you make, muscle loading depends on whether you are doing it consciously or not. Beautiful movements are always supported by inner-body muscles, called, “core muscles.”
